Gallery: Fred Herzog’s photos ‘a revelation’

Stephen Hunt, Calgary Herald01.31.2013

Granville Street from Granville Bridge, 1966/2009
Why shoot in colour then? “One possibility that he hasn’t said,” Brodovitch says, “but is my read into it, is that growing up in the war in Germany and then coming here when he was 20 — you know, being absolutely in awe of the beauty and colourfulness of this place, (was that) colour film was the only thing that reproduced that.” Copyright Fred Herzog
Photo: Courtesy TrepanierBaer Gallery

Man in Black Hat, 1959
Kodachrome may be gone, but Herzog still shoots. “He shoots digital now,” Brodovitch says. “Like a lot of photographers of his generation ... they are totally amazed by the technology. They don’t have a weird nostalgia for film, they’re like, why would you drag film around? He goes out walking and taking pictures on a regular basis still, goes back to the same neighbourhoods he used to shoot.
“For all intents and purposes,” she adds, at the age of 83, “he’s an emerging artist still.” Copyright Fred Herzog
Photo: Courtesy TrepanierBaer Gallery

Hub and Lux, 1958/2008
When Herzog began shooting colour photos upon his move to Vancouver in 1953, Brodovitch says, no other artists used colour. “Colour photography at that time was mostly reserved for amateur photographers. It was thought of that art photography had three colours: black, white and grey. Colour photographs were what you took on a family holiday, or something like that. The fact that he was using colour photography — shooting in streets, the everyday immigrant neighbourhoods, and not photographing, say, beautiful sunsets or whatever, is kind of important because that body of work essentially doesn’t exist anymore from that time period.” Copyright Fred Herzog
Photo: Courtesy TrepanierBaer Gallery

Foot of Main, 1968/2007
Kodachrome, which Herzog shot an estimated 100,000 images on, started in 1935 and went out of business in 2009, and stopped processing Kodachrome film in 2010. One of the reasons why it was difficult to shoot on, Brodovitch says, is that it shoots much more slowly than other film. Copyright Fred HerzogPhoto: Courtesy TrépanierBaer GalleryCopyright Fred Herzog Photo: Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery
/ Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery

Flaneur, 1960
“Herzog was drawn to colour photography,” wrote Tousley, “because he found it was the most immediate and successful medium for photo-realism, his style of working. His aim was to capture the city’s vitality, and colour film did that and enhanced it. It registered the vast amount of fine detail that filled the vantage points from which Herzog chose to shoot.” Photo courtesy Glenbow Museum
Copyright Fred Herzog

Orange Cars Powell, 1973/2011
“When it’s all said and done, very few exhibitions come along to reveal whole, new, mostly unknown bodies of work by a living artist,” wrote Tousley, reviewing the 2007 show, “but the Vancouver Art Gallery does this in spades with Fred Herzog: Vancouver Photographs.“He was quite pleased with himself I think,” says Brodovitch. “When he was 76 and could put down artist on his tax returns.” Copyright Fred HerzogPhoto: Courtesy TrépanierBaer GalleryCopyright Fred Herzog Photo: Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery
/ Courtesy TrépanierBaer Gallery

Black Man Pender, 1958, Printed 2007
“One of the reasons this work is so little known is that Herzog shot Kodachrome slide film and did not make many prints,” Tousley wrote in 2007. “To make large colour prints was expensive and time consuming, not something you could do handily in a home darkroom. He did sometimes make prints and show them, but the opportunities to see his work in those years were at the slide shows he gave at places like the art school, the Arts Club, the Vancouver Art Gallery.” Photo courtesy Glenbow Museum
Copyright Fred Herzog

Robson Street, 1957
Herzog became an art star in 2007, at the age of 77. “Pretty remarkable,” says Brodovitch. “Essentially his first solo art show was at the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was a retrospective of his work — so it’s a pretty rare way of entering the art world.” Photo courtesy Glenbow Museum
Copyright Fred Herzog

Hastings at Columbia, 1958
“Well-known younger Vancouver photographers, whose work his foreshadows, didn’t know his photographs because there was nowhere for them to see it: In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, Herzog’s work appeared in just three group shows,” wrote the Herald’s Governor-General Award winning art critic Nancy Tousley in 2007. “But his DNA has been in the Vancouver photography scene for half a century.” Photo courtesy Glenbow Museum
Copyright Fred Herzog

Man With Bandage, 1968, Printed 2009
Herzog emigrated to Vancouver in 1953, and would walk the streets shooting photographs unposed, explains Equinox director Sophie Brodovitch. For Man With Bandage, “He shot that from the hip,” she says. “His camera was actually around his side and he just saw it and pressed the button and it was just set in the exact right moment.” Photo courtesy Glenbow Museum
Copyright Fred Herzog

Fred Herzog grew up poor in wartime Germany before emigrating to Canada in the early 1950s, and to Vancouver in 1953. His images of Vancouver streetlife, shot using Kodachrome colour slide film, provide a visual history of that city’s transition during the 1950s, ’60s and ‘’70s. They’re stunning to look at now, almost the visual equivalent of the poems of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, but for years, according to Governor-General Award winning former Herald art critic Nancy Tousley, Herzog rarely even made prints of his work. He didn’t really break out as an art star until 2007, when the Vancouver Art Gallery and Equinox Gallery in Vancouver held simultaneous exhibitions of his photos — at the age of 77.

Now, two prominent shows of Herzog’s work give Calgary audiences a chance to experience Herzog’s work up close and personal. Fred Herzog: Street Photography is up and running at the Glenbow, while a second exhibition, featuring 32 photos, opens Saturday afternoon at Trepanier-Baer Gallery.

“Fred Herzog’s photos are a revelation,” says Glenbow’s Interim CEO and President Donna Livingstone. “They show us that there are myriad stories to be discovered in everyday urban environments, stories that can only be revealed through an artist’s eye.

“Herzog walked the arteries of inner-city Vancouver and he captured the very pulse of that place and time. Fifty years later, his work is inspiring all of us, including new photographers, to pay attention and be inspired by our built environments and the colourful human figures who populate them.”

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